Factory Records (the sadly defunct home of such luminaries as New Order and Joy Division), made some interesting comments on Digital Audio Tape that relect my thinking on MP3's.
They stated that ignoring DAT as a format, which many record companies wanted to do, was a daft idea. Mainstream record companies were worried about promoting the format, as they saw the proliferation of DAT recorders as a threat to CD's. Fears of a piracy boom, as people made CD quality copies on DAT, lead to a dubious copy protection system being used on many DAT machines.
Ultimately DAT was only ever really used as a cheap mastering format, and never made it into the home.
However Factory Records attitude towards DAT as a commercial format is instructive. They argued that when most people bought records, tapes, etc. they were buying an 'artifact' not just the music contained on the storage media. To counter the desire to pirate the original media Factory declared their intent to package their products to enhance the status of the artifact. They had been doing this anyway, with packaging like the Blue Monday record sleeve - a die cut imitation of a floppy disk.
If the music industry sees the MP3 format as a threat to sales, then they shouldn't try to end it's existence, but encompass it within their marketing. Working with equipment manufacturers they could produce alternative distribution formats, that enhance the choice of waht the consumers buy. No more buying a CD album just for two great tracks and ten filler ones - the buyer could mix and match tracks from artists on the label, and pay for some form of digital media...
I applaud Cygnus Solution's decision to release an IDE for Linux, and I hope it attracts new coders to the platform. However, I've always found IDE's an anti-climax on any platform. The amount of time I expended on learning the quirks of another editor, key bindings for compiling, etc. was never rewarded by increased productivity.
While an editor like vi or emacs, and a debugger like gdb may look daunting to new users, learning them is far more useful than learning an IDE. The IDE has one task - providing a frontend for development. A standard Unix editor (and this includes GUI ones like Nedit) is far more rewarding to learn, as it can be used for more general tasks than programming.
I've seen some IDE's that allow the user to specify which editor to use for code-editing. This really invalidates the IDE concept, as the while point of an IDE is to provide integrated tools, but they can't be relied on to support the features of vastly different editors.
Another gripe about IDE's is that they usually employ wrapper utilities for programs like make and gcc. This is fine until something breaks. Having done some of my programming on Windows NT 3.51, I can honestly say that those who learn programming in VC++ are stumped when the IDE 'breaks'. They are unable to grasp the fact the VC++ is just a frontend to a make utility, command line compiler and debugger. When VC++ failed to work on a project file, I simply edited the make file by hand and compiled from the command line. My co-workers didn't have the first idea about how to do this, having learnt to code on VC++ or Borland IDE's.
Smart webdevelopers do use JavaScript - but sparingly. It's great for a little form validation (takes the strain off of the server) and working out what the client's browser is.
This whole DHTML thing is a little bit tiring though. It seems like the world of graphic designers and marketing people have finally got their way with DHTML...
I still snigger when I recall the time I set up a website for a company I worked at. As the only Internet savvy individual there I got lumbered with the task, (after a supposedly 'professional' firm failed to produce the goods).
The marketing manager tried to have me reprimanded for using the ''wrong pantone shade'' for the company logo, and for not ensuring it fitted perfectly on an A4 page(!).
There again that's the same company that insisted on NT for the frontline application webserver, and then wondered why it handled high loads less happily than a SparcStation 1 running Linux...
The Junkbuster proxy (available for Unix and Windows) is a great little utility that can get rid of annoying banner ads. It simply uses a 'blocklist' to stop ads and a whitelist to allow cookies from certain domains.
For instance Slashdot loads a damned sight faster with it, but you can configure it so that your registration cookie still gets set.
I notice that the x86-glibc2 version of Communicator for Linux has moved out of the unsupported directory into the supported one. No Sparc Linux version yet though...
Don't know if this makes any difference to the average Linux user... but I still wonder if it's significant.
As someone who made a living from SGML for three years, this is actually far more interesting than it is for most people. SGML was just too unwieldy for the mass market in Europe. Although it's platform independent and adaptable, SGML hasn't really taken off. Part of the problem was the dearth of tools that could make SGML accessible. SoftQuad's Author Editor showed some promise, but it's only really notable for forming the basis of HotMetal Pro.
When XML was in its infancy, along with XSL and the proposed mathematical markup language, I attended a number of meetings intended to evangelise the new standard. I came away feeling disillusioned. Here was a great idea that took the best of SGML and DSSSL, and marketed it towards the newly Internet savvy public. However, the same bunch of zealots that buried SGML in technical obscurity looked set to do the same.
I think it's fair to say that SGML's only lasting monument so far, is its application on the World Wide Web (as HTML). Great DTD's like the US military ones (pertaining to things like tables and the like) were not enough to prevent the death of SGML as a data interchange format.
Hopefully efforts like this financial data standard will encourage further use of XML, and bring about an end to proprietary standards for data interchange. No more bloated word processor file formats concerned principally with style rather than structure. The use of XML in projects like the Gnome desktop will maybe adavnce this idea, and bring about a revolution in desktop publishing. Never again will I have to tell a publisher to f*ck off when they give me useless data in the form of deadend Word, or worse, Framemaker files.
I doubt whether he'll publish an apology, but at least his mail seems to have been screwed. I just tried to mail a comment on the technical innacuracies in his article, but the mailservers refused it...
There is a small and powerfull sequencer package for Linux called Rosegarden. It's GPL'ed unlike all the other MIDI sequencers for Unix that I've seen. It may look outdated (it uses nothing but Xlib for the GUI), but it is intuitive and *very* fast.
Check it out at:
http://www.bath.ac.uk/~masjpf/rose.html
A new version using the GTK+ and Gnome libs for the interface is at the conceptual stage.
I bought an official copy of RedHat 4.2, having used Walnut Creek compilations up until then. I didn't need the manual or the support, but I felt RedHat deserved some payback for liberating me from SunOS around about the time of version 3.0.3.
I slavishly upgrade whenever a new version of RedHat comes out, but since 4.2 I've burnt my own copies. Then came a change of job, and no more access to a CD writer. How was I going to get a copy of RedHat 6.0 (both Sparc and Intel)?
Easy. I bought them both at Cheapbytes for less than the cost of a blank CD in the UK.
I still buy my copies of Motif (sorry about the non-free software, but I need it for work) from RedHat, so they're getting something back from me using their distro.
The moral of this is:
Regardless of the price of an official boxset of RedHat, I don't have to pay that price, unless I want to...
As for RedHat bashing, I agree that they only get slated because they are so popular. And the 'made for RedHat' syndrome also afflicts SuSE - Informix originally released their database only for SuSE Linux. But this is only a problem when you don't get the source. Even with semi-free packages like Qt, thanks to Troll Tech providing source, I can compile it on SuSE Linux, RedHat Linux, FreeBSD or even NetBSD.
I think you'll find there are more Nazi parties and their party members in the US than in Germany. In fact the few authoritarian features of modern German law relate to the active suppression of far-right organisations.
The mindset that afflicted most European countries in the 1930's is alive and well... But a little further East than the Rhine.
I haven't installed RedHat 6.0 yet, although as I'll be putting it on a Sparc I wont be playing Civ:CTP on it even when I do... Therefore I'm assuming that RedHat 6.0 has glibc 2.1 and no 'legacy' 2.0 C libs.
However, I noticed on LokiSoft's site that there are known problems with the game on glibc 2.1 machines. This will be fixed in the 1.1 patch.
Chris Wareham
Unix in a Nutshell vs. Linux in a Nutshell
on
Unix in a Nutshell
·
· Score: 1
As the review points out, Linux adopts many conventions from SVR4, so I would recommend this 'Nutshell...' over the Linux specific one.
I also like the troff reference - don't laugh, I still use it for simple documents that can't justify full typesetting in LaTeX.
Chris Wareham
Next time try actually configuring it ...
on
The KDE Future
·
· Score: 1
I don't know what WM you were using, I assume it was E. If so, then next time you try it out, configure it using e-conf.
As for the flickering, I assume you're running at 8bit colour depth. Try starting you X server up with the following:
startx -- -bpp 16
This should stop it flickering.
Chris (KDE and Gnome fan)
Chris Wareham
Feature set only omits one thing for me ...
on
AbiWord 0.7 release
·
· Score: 2
Embedding graphics is the only thing missing for me at the moment. Obviously some people will miss something from such massively featured packages as Word or WordPerfect, but remember how many years development have gone into those.
Personally I hope that if AbiWord does start to have more esoteric features, that the developers come up with a simple plugin module that makes all such addons optional.
The elegance and low memory footprint of AbiWord are one of its coolest features. I hope they don't eventually make it dependent on Gnome libs, as I like the fact it needs little more than Glib and GTK+. For my stripped down FreeBSD machine at work, this is perfect as it is.
Chris Wareham
This is a truly great package - go get it!
on
AbiWord 0.7 release
·
· Score: 1
I've been using AbiWord for about a month now, having come to the conclusion that GWP development has ground to a halt. I haven't checked out the go word processor yet, but AbiWord is magnificent.
The export to HTML and printing to file is perfect as far as I can see, which means I haven't touched a LaTeX file for weeks!
I suppose he is going to promote Gnome over KDE, but his comments are a little inflammatory. I use Gnome nad Linux at home, and KDE and FreeBSD at work, and have to admit that KDE is far more stable at the moment than Gnome. I prefer GTK+ to Qt, but that's simply because I prefer C to C++. So before the flame war starts, lets remember that KDE and Gnome promote healthy competition on the Linux desktop - something the Windows world sadly lacks. Chris Wareham
Agreed that Kernighan and Pike (K&P anyone?) is a great book, regardless of its age. However it is more a programmers introductory Unix book than a sysadmins book of tips.
Slashdot Mirror
Factory Records (the sadly defunct home of such luminaries as New Order and Joy Division), made some interesting comments on
...
Digital Audio Tape that relect my thinking on MP3's.
They stated that ignoring DAT as a format, which many record companies wanted to do, was a daft idea. Mainstream record
companies were worried about promoting the format, as they saw the proliferation of DAT recorders as a threat to CD's. Fears of a
piracy boom, as people made CD quality copies on DAT, lead to a dubious copy protection system being used on many DAT
machines.
Ultimately DAT was only ever really used as a cheap mastering format, and never made it into the home.
However Factory Records attitude towards DAT as a commercial format is instructive. They argued that when most people bought
records, tapes, etc. they were buying an 'artifact' not just the music contained on the storage media. To counter the desire to pirate
the original media Factory declared their intent to package their products to enhance the status of the artifact. They had been doing
this anyway, with packaging like the Blue Monday record sleeve - a die cut imitation of a floppy disk.
If the music industry sees the MP3 format as a threat to sales, then they shouldn't try to end it's existence, but encompass it within
their marketing. Working with equipment manufacturers they could produce alternative distribution formats, that enhance the choice of
waht the consumers buy. No more buying a CD album just for two great tracks and ten filler ones - the buyer could mix and match
tracks from artists on the label, and pay for some form of digital media
An idea anyway.
Chris Wareham
I applaud Cygnus Solution's decision to release an IDE for Linux, and I hope it attracts new coders to the platform. However, I've always found IDE's an anti-climax on any platform. The amount of time I expended on learning the quirks of another editor, key bindings for compiling, etc. was never rewarded by increased productivity.
While an editor like vi or emacs, and a debugger like gdb may look daunting to new users, learning them is far more useful than learning an IDE. The IDE has one task - providing a frontend for development. A standard Unix editor (and this includes GUI ones like Nedit) is far more rewarding to learn, as it can be used for more general tasks than programming.
I've seen some IDE's that allow the user to specify which editor to use for code-editing. This really invalidates the IDE concept, as the while point of an IDE is to provide integrated tools, but they can't be relied on to support the features of vastly different editors.
Another gripe about IDE's is that they usually employ wrapper utilities for programs like make and gcc. This is fine until something breaks. Having done some of my programming on Windows NT 3.51, I can honestly say that those who learn programming in VC++ are stumped when the IDE 'breaks'. They are unable to grasp the fact the VC++ is just a frontend to a make utility, command line compiler and debugger. When VC++ failed to work on a project file, I simply edited the make file by hand and compiled from the command line. My co-workers didn't have the first idea about how to do this, having learnt to code on VC++ or Borland IDE's.
Chris Wareham
(see subject line)
Chris Wareham
Having gone back and read the article in its entirety, it seems disabling the .htr stuff doesn't solve the problem ...
Chris Wareham
Microsoft are aware of the problem ...
... I'm in shock.
My god
Chris Wareham
... in which case I agree.
Sendmail is the single most apalling thing about Unix systems. The sooner someone comes up with a modern, easily configurable alternative the better.
Chris Wareham
This should be a good test of commercial software versus free. The Linux DoS bug was patched within hours - lets see how long MS takes to :
a) admit the problem (if ever)
b) fix it
Chris Wareham
Smart webdevelopers do use JavaScript - but sparingly. It's great for a little form validation (takes the strain off of the server) and working out what the client's browser is.
...
...
This whole DHTML thing is a little bit tiring though. It seems like the world of graphic designers and marketing people have finally got their way with DHTML
I still snigger when I recall the time I set up a website for a company I worked at. As the only Internet savvy individual there I got lumbered with the task, (after a supposedly 'professional' firm failed to produce the goods).
The marketing manager tried to have me reprimanded for using the ''wrong pantone shade'' for the company logo, and for not ensuring it fitted perfectly on an A4 page(!).
There again that's the same company that insisted on NT for the frontline application webserver, and then wondered why it handled high loads less happily than a SparcStation 1 running Linux
Chris Wareham
The Junkbuster proxy (available for Unix and Windows) is a great little utility that can get rid of annoying banner ads. It simply uses a 'blocklist' to stop ads and a whitelist to allow cookies from certain domains.
...
For instance Slashdot loads a damned sight faster with it, but you can configure it so that your registration cookie still gets set.
Check it out at:
http://www.junkbuster.com/
Oh yeah, it's free
Chris Wareham
I notice that the x86-glibc2 version of Communicator for Linux has moved out of the unsupported directory into the supported one. No Sparc Linux version yet though ...
... but I still wonder if it's significant.
Don't know if this makes any difference to the average Linux user
Chris Wareham
As someone who made a living from SGML for three years, this is actually far more interesting than it is for most people. SGML was just too unwieldy for the mass market in Europe. Although it's platform independent and adaptable, SGML hasn't really taken off. Part of the problem was the dearth of tools that could make SGML accessible. SoftQuad's Author Editor showed some promise, but it's only really notable for forming the basis of HotMetal Pro.
When XML was in its infancy, along with XSL and the proposed mathematical markup language, I attended a number of meetings intended to evangelise the new standard. I came away feeling disillusioned. Here was a great idea that took the best of SGML and DSSSL, and marketed it towards the newly Internet savvy public. However, the same bunch of zealots that buried SGML in technical obscurity looked set to do the same.
I think it's fair to say that SGML's only lasting monument so far, is its application on the World Wide Web (as HTML). Great DTD's like the US military ones (pertaining to things like tables and the like) were not enough to prevent the death of SGML as a data interchange format.
Hopefully efforts like this financial data standard will encourage further use of XML, and bring about an end to proprietary standards for data interchange. No more bloated word processor file formats concerned principally with style rather than structure. The use of XML in projects like the Gnome desktop will maybe adavnce this idea, and bring about a revolution in desktop publishing. Never again will I have to tell a publisher to f*ck off when they give me useless data in the form of deadend Word, or worse, Framemaker files.
At least I can hope.
Chris Wareham
I doubt whether he'll publish an apology, but at least his mail seems to have been screwed. I just tried to mail a comment on the technical innacuracies in his article, but the mailservers refused it ...
Chris Wareham
There is a small and powerfull sequencer package for Linux called Rosegarden. It's GPL'ed unlike all the other MIDI sequencers for Unix that I've seen. It may look outdated (it uses nothing but Xlib for the GUI), but it is intuitive and *very* fast.
Check it out at:
http://www.bath.ac.uk/~masjpf/rose.html
A new version using the GTK+ and Gnome libs for the interface is at the conceptual stage.
Chris Wareham
I bought an official copy of RedHat 4.2, having used Walnut Creek compilations up until then. I didn't need the manual or the support, but I felt RedHat deserved some payback for liberating me from SunOS around about the time of version 3.0.3.
...
I slavishly upgrade whenever a new version of RedHat comes out, but since 4.2 I've burnt my own copies. Then came a change of job, and no more access to a CD writer. How was I going to get a copy of RedHat 6.0 (both Sparc and Intel)?
Easy. I bought them both at Cheapbytes for less than the cost of a blank CD in the UK.
I still buy my copies of Motif (sorry about the non-free software, but I need it for work) from RedHat, so they're getting something back from me using their distro.
The moral of this is:
Regardless of the price of an official boxset of RedHat, I don't have to pay that price, unless I want to
As for RedHat bashing, I agree that they only get slated because they are so popular. And the 'made for RedHat' syndrome also afflicts SuSE - Informix originally released their database only for SuSE Linux. But this is only a problem when you don't get the source. Even with semi-free packages like Qt, thanks to Troll Tech providing source, I can compile it on SuSE Linux, RedHat Linux, FreeBSD or even NetBSD.
Chris Wareham
That's me fscked then :
http://www.incubation.demon.co.uk/
... should show why.
But anyway, what about gothic architecture?
Literature? I know some Ann Radcliffe (18th
century novelist) is a bit arse, but this is
plain daft.
Chris Wareham
I think you'll find there are more Nazi parties
... But a little
and their party members in the US than in Germany.
In fact the few authoritarian features of modern
German law relate to the active suppression of
far-right organisations.
The mindset that afflicted most European countries
in the 1930's is alive and well
further East than the Rhine.
Chris
Chris Wareham
I haven't installed RedHat 6.0 yet, although as ... Therefore I'm
I'll be putting it on a Sparc I wont be playing
Civ:CTP on it even when I do
assuming that RedHat 6.0 has glibc 2.1 and no
'legacy' 2.0 C libs.
However, I noticed on LokiSoft's site that there
are known problems with the game on glibc 2.1
machines. This will be fixed in the 1.1 patch.
Chris Wareham
As the review points out, Linux adopts many conventions from SVR4, so I would recommend this 'Nutshell ...' over the Linux specific one.
I also like the troff reference - don't laugh, I
still use it for simple documents that can't justify full typesetting in LaTeX.
Chris Wareham
I don't know what WM you were using, I assume it was E. If so, then next time you try it out, configure it using e-conf.
As for the flickering, I assume you're running at
8bit colour depth. Try starting you X server up with the following:
startx -- -bpp 16
This should stop it flickering.
Chris
(KDE and Gnome fan)
Chris Wareham
Embedding graphics is the only thing missing for
me at the moment. Obviously some people will miss
something from such massively featured packages as
Word or WordPerfect, but remember how many years
development have gone into those.
Personally I hope that if AbiWord does start to
have more esoteric features, that the developers
come up with a simple plugin module that makes
all such addons optional.
The elegance and low memory footprint of AbiWord
are one of its coolest features. I hope they don't
eventually make it dependent on Gnome libs, as I
like the fact it needs little more than Glib and
GTK+. For my stripped down FreeBSD machine at
work, this is perfect as it is.
Chris Wareham
I've been using AbiWord for about a month now,
having come to the conclusion that GWP development
has ground to a halt. I haven't checked out the
go word processor yet, but AbiWord is magnificent.
The export to HTML and printing to file is perfect
as far as I can see, which means I haven't touched
a LaTeX file for weeks!
Chris Wareham
I suppose he is going to promote Gnome over KDE, but his comments are a little inflammatory. I use Gnome nad Linux at home, and KDE and FreeBSD at work, and have to admit that KDE is far more stable at the moment than Gnome. I prefer GTK+ to Qt, but that's simply because I prefer C to C++. So before the flame war starts, lets remember that KDE and Gnome promote healthy competition on the Linux desktop - something the Windows world sadly lacks.
Chris Wareham
Shurely shome mishtake.
Chris Wareham
It would need to be a multi-volume effort like the X Programming series ...
Chris Wareham
Agreed that Kernighan and Pike (K&P anyone?) is a great book, regardless of its age. However it is more a programmers introductory Unix book than a sysadmins book of tips.
Chris Wareham